The first week of our 20th anniversary Chess Camp is underway and to get things off to a completely random start we wanted to hold a Geography contest midweek to see which camper is best suited to dominate this important school subject.

As an example: do you know what the largest lake in the world is? How about largest island? ( if not keep reading the answers are at bottom of article).

We had two tournament groups in week one and the winners were Isak Dubrow in the rated group (it helped that Zachary Mankowitz had a school function that week and Isak won that tough game by forfeit), and Joshua Kodosh in the unrated group (Daniel Paley got second place).Both Joshua, and Isak thereby get 1 point each for the summer long grand prix competition for best tournament player.

The best students in the study groups were Eric in Slava’s group (Eric did the best in memorizing the classic miniature game “Kasparov vs West” that ended with a lovely decoy maneuver that nets or a rook, or wins a queen via Discovered check), Lauren Messer in Ivette’s group, and Shira Sagger in Justin’s group.Eric, Lauren, and Shira all get 1 point each for the summer long grand prix competition for best student.

Yael Sagger was the winner for best notation, while big Zachary Mankowitz was the winner for the problem solving competition.

In the sports events Zachary Mankowitz was the winner for the oldest group, while Joshua Kodosh was the winner for the middle group, and David Milstein was the winner for the youngest group.

Isak Dubrow, the wily veteran also scored the most points in the week long dodgeball event to win a prize there.

Friday also marked our relay race day and the winners there were the “Hog Riders” who were comprised of Josh Kodosh, Eric Meng, and Yaakov Weiner.

On Friday we also had our tradition blitz/bughouse event and the winners there were the team of “Quik Paley” which included Leon Berenfeld (who wore a shirt with QuikSilver on it) and Danny Paley (whose last name is Paley). There was a four way tie after the end of the round robin portion so we added two tie break rounds to the tail end to determine a winner, and in the finale Leon captured David Milstein’s king in the last bughouse round to seal the deal for “Quik Paley.”

Last but not least there were 3 students who scored 11/11 in the geography contest and they were Joshua Kodosh, Isak Dubrow, and Leon Berenfeld.

Oh and the answers to the questions above were “The Caspian Sea” and “Greenland.See you guys next week.